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Today’s Random Question is looking at your favourite tracking shots, expensive crane shots, impressive shots or just long takes in general. Some of my favourites include the tracking shots in Boogie Nights, I Am Cuba, Goodfellas and Werckmeister Harmonies, but you can probably think of a lot more. Let me know some of your favourites […]

To contrast with yesterday’s post about jump cuts is a larger list about long takes. I was recently reminded by Scott at FRC of something Steven Spielberg once said: “Cuts are for action and long takes are for emotion.” This, I think, is very true. Thus I’ve decided to make a list of ten of […]

Michael Snow’s 1967 film Wavelength has been hailed by critics and moviegoers but it has also been heavily criticized by the general public to be ‘boring,’ ‘uneventful,’ ‘pointless’ and a ‘complete waste of time.’ It is only 43 minutes in length, so one might not consider it a proper, full length movie, but after recently viewing it I watched it carefully and took in all it had to say, mulling it over for a few hours before writing this post. And I have to say, I liked it. A lot. And I think I get it. I wasn’t bored. In fact, if I’m actually watching a very good movie it won’t matter how long it is. I won’t get bored. And there was a lot to look at here and a lot to take in.

The plot is so simple that to actually say the film has a plot is a joke. All it is is one shot (actually quite a few shots edited together to look like one) of a room, the shot visible at the top of this post. Throughout the film’s 40 minutes, the camera extremely slowly zooms in, until settling on a postcard photo of the ocean, before fading to white and ending. That’s it. During the film’s slow, lagging pace, we are also greeted with the sights of a woman having furniture moved into the room, sitting and listening to the radio, and re-entering a long period after to find a dead man on the floor. As these events happen, director Michael Snow could not give a flying f*ck. All he cares about is the slow zoom on the postcard. This makes the film original, clever, and gives it a specific target and a mind of its own. It, in fact, represents the entire process of watching a film. We start out at the beginning, and we’re slowly building to a climax (represented by the postcard) that we can barely see if we squint, but as the film progresses, we get closer and closer to that climax, until finally at the end, we see it. The whole of Wavelength is an excercise in what we can sit through. A good film takes its time to reach the climax, and Snow is representing that timeline with a deceptively simple zoom on a picture. A very clever metaphor.

Snow further tests the audience by playing on the soundtrack a, long consecutive beeping noise which begins at the 8-minute mark and lasts until the very end. It slowly becomes more high-pitched, louder, and annoying, representing the intense buildup to a climax we might feel while watching a movie. Snow tests the audience. Many will be bored and frustrated with the film, particularly that distracting beep, but watching Wavelength is not so much as watching a film as it is analysing human endurance in filmmaking and storytelling; what we can sit through, and whether our curiosity to the ending will be enough to make us sit through what might seem otherwise like a piece of time-wasting crap. It’s an excercise, to be studied and learned from.

I’d like to make this a longer review, but there’s really not much more to say. The film looks simple, and it is. Some people will be able to sit through it, and will walk away having learned something, but others will be bored out of their mind and will likely not finish it or fast forward through it. Don’t do this. It’s not how you should watch a movie. It’s cheating yourself.

Conveniently, Snow also created WVLNT, which is essentially the whole film, edited down to about 15 minutes. I’m sure it has a similar impact and can be learnt from in the same manner as the original, but the whole point of its long, unbearable pace is to force you to think about what on Earth it means and why you’re watching it. This is not a waste of time; this a great way to spend time if you’re trying to analyse what really goes into making a movie and the stress a director feels about whether the audience will be able to sit through their film. This is Snow’s point: sitting through this is just like sitting through a normal movie. It starts out simple enough, and leads expectingly to a gratifying ending that we know we’ve been slowly approaching the whole time. Fantastic.

My Rating: 8/10.

So, put yourself to the ultimate endurance test. Watch Wavelength right here, right now. Try to do it without skipping parts, fast forwarding or turning it off altogether. It might be a small achievement to make it through, but it’s an achievement nonetheless:

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Seen Wavelength? What did you think of it? A work of art or a waste of time? Leave a comment below.

Recently, John at The Droid You’re Looking For made a sequel to his hugely successful “100 Things I Love About the Movies” post, and being a fan of both posts, I’ve decided it’s about time I did my own. It was a very inspirational and thoughtful post, and if you read it yourself it might just make you want to do one of the same. For now, here’s mine:

1: Hi-hi-hi there, at last we meet.

2: The shaking fence in Evil Dead.

3: A rape depicted through the clever usage of a silent movie in Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her.

4: Qantas never crashed.

5: Whatever you want, Leo Getz.

6: The stunning ending to Lars von Trier’s Dogville.

7: Dave. Stop, Dave. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it.

8: The best movie cut of all history in Lawrence of Arabia.

9: The theme that plays when we see the man with the Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West.

19: The emotion and raw energy with which Kirk Douglas delivers this line in Paths of Glory: “I apologise to you, sir, for not informing you sooner that you’re a degenerate, sadistic old man, and you can go to Hell before I apologise to you now or ever again!”

20: John C. Reilly shining his flashlight into the camera in Magnolia.

21: Blood Simple to True Grit and everything in between.

22: Hello… Hello, Dimitri? I… I can’t hear, could you turn the music down? That’s great, you’re coming through fine. I’m coming through fine, too, am I? I agree with you, it’s great to be fine. Now then, Dimitri. One of our generals… he went a little funny in the head… you know, funny. And he went and did a silly thing.

23: Tracking shots. All of them.

24: The Monty Python movies (“I fart in your general direction!”)

25: Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life.

84: …and the uniquely different but still subtly similar version presented by a suprisingly good Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill.

85: Dustin Hoffman’s moving turn as Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy…

86: …and the eerie subtle similarities between Jon Voight’s character in the same movie and Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights.

87: Mr. Jingles.

88: I just wanted to hold the little baby.

89: You mean the man who inserted rubber fist in my anus was a homosexual?

90: The stunning revelation at the end of Spoorloos (The Vanishing).

91: How quickly a director can take my interest, and how stunningly tight their grip remains on me within the shortest of times, and how it can last seemingly forever, as evidenced by my recent delve into the films of Ingmar Bergman.

92: Hit Girl.

93: Bill Murray waking up to the same nauseatingly repetitive jingle every morning in Groundhog Day.